Blest! Who can unconcernedly findHours, days, and years slide soft away,In health of body, peace of mind,Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and easeTogether mixed; sweet recreation,And innocence, with most does please,With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;Thus unlamented let me die;Steal from the world, and not a stoneTell where I lie.

Alexander Pope

Summer

See what delights in sylvan scenes appear!Descending Gods have found Elysium here.In woods bright Venus with Adonis strayed,And chaste Diana haunts the forest shade.Come lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours,When swains from shearing seek their nightly bowers;When weary reapers quit the sultry field,And crowned with corn, their thanks to Ceres yield.This harmless grove no lurking viper hides,But in my breast the serpent Love abides.Here bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew,But your Alexis knows no sweets but you.Oh deign to visit our forsaken seats,The mossy fountains, and the green retreats!Where-eser you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,Where-eser you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.Oh! How I long with you to pass my days,Invoke the muses, and resound your praise;Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,And winds shall waft it ti the powers above.But would you sing, and rival Orpheus’ strain,The wondering forest soon should dance again,The moving mountains hear the powerful call,And headlong streams hang listening in their fall!But see, the shepherds shun the noon-day heat,The lowing herds to murmering brooks retreat,To closer shades the panting flocks remove,Ye Gods! And is there no relief for Love?But soon the sun with milder rays descendsTo the cool ocean, where his journey ends;On me Loves fiercer flames for every prey,By night he scorches, as he burns by day.

Alexander Pope

The Riddle of the World

Know then thyself, presume not God to scanThe proper study of Mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise, and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoices pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;In doubt his mind and body to prefer;Burn but to die, and reasening but to err;Whether he thinks to little, or too much;Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;Still by himself, abused or disabused;Created half to rise and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey it all,Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;The glory, jest an riddle of the world.

Alexander Sergeyevich Puskhin

An Elegy

The senseless years extinguished mirth and laughterOppress me like some hazy morning-after.But sadness of days past, as alcohol –The more it age, the stronger grip the soul.My course is dull. The future’s troubled oceanForebodes me toil, misfortune and commotion.

But no, my friends, I do not wish to leave;I’d rather live, to ponder and to grieve –And I shall have my share of delectationAmid all care, distress and agitation:Time and again I’ll savor harmony,Melt into tears about some fantasy,And on my sad decline, to ease affliction,May love yet show her smile of valediction.

Alexander Sergeyevich Puskhin

Imitation

I saw the Death, and she was seatingBy quiet entrance at my own home,I saw the doors were opened in my tomb,And there, and there my hope was a-flittingI’ll die, and traces of my pastIn days of future will be never sighted,Look of my eyes will never be delightedBy dear look, in my existence last.

Farewell the somber world, where, precipice above,My gloomy road was a-streaming,Where life for me was never cheering,Where I was loving, having not to love!The dazzling heavens azure curtain,Beloved hills, the brooks enchanthing dance,Yue, mourn –the inspirations chance,You, peaceful shades of wilderness, uncertain,And all – farewell, farewell at once.

Alexander Sergeyevich Puskhin

The Upas Tree

Deep in the deserts misery,Far in fury of the sand,There stands the awesome Upas TreeLone watchman of lifeless land.

The wilderness, a world or thirst,In wrath engendered it and filledIts every root, every accursedGrey leafstalk with a sap that killed.

Dissolving in the midday sunThe poison oozes through its bark,And freezing when the day is doneGleams thick and gem-like in the dark.

No bird flies near, no tiger creeps;Alone the whirlwind, wild and black,Assails the tree of death and sweepsAway with death upon its back.

And though some roving cloud may stainWith glancing drops those leaden leaves,The dripping of poisoned rainIs all the burning sand receives.

But man sent man with one proud lookTowards the tree, and he was gone,The humble one, and there he tookThe poison and returned at dawn.

He brought the deadly gum; with itHe brought some leaves, a withered bough,While rivulets of icy sweatRan slowly down his livid brow.

He came, he fell upon a mat,And reaping a poor slave’s reward,Died near the painted hut where satHis now unconquerable lord.

The king, he soaked his arrows trueIn poison, and beyond the plainsDispatched those messengers and slewHis neighbors in their own domains.

Alfred Noyes

A Loom of Years

In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,In the weary cry of the wind and whisper of flower and tree,Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mouldTo colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold:Light and scent and music die and are born againIn the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain.

The hound, the fawn, and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo,We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through,One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fearsAs it goes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The green uncrumpling fern and the rustling dewdrenched rosePass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close,Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars,Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars.

Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight?Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro’ the warp of the night!Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears,As it comes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

O, woven in one wide Loom thro’ the throbbing weft of the whole,One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul,Tho’ the leaf were alone in its falling, the birds in its hour to die,The heart in its muffed anguish, the sea in its mournful cry,

One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moonOne with the granite mountains that melt into the noonOne with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

Alfred Noyes

Song

I came to the door of the House of LoveAnd knocked as the starry night went by;And my true love cried “who knocks?” and I said“It is I.”

And love looked down from a lattice aboveWhere the roses were dry as the lips of the dead:“there is not room in the House of LoveFor you both,” he said.

I plucked a leaf from the porch and creptAway through a desert of scoffs and scornsTo a lonely place where I prayed and weptAnd wove me a crown of thorns.

I came once more to the House of LoveAnd knocked, ah, softly and wistfully,And my true love cried “who knocks?” and I said“None now but thee.”

And the great doors opened wide apartAnd a voice rang out from a glory of light,“make room, make room for a faithful heartIn the House of Love, to night.”

Alfred Noyes

Shakespeare’s Kingdom

When Shakespeare came to LondonHe met no shouthing throngs;He carried in his knapsackA scroll of quiet songs.

No proud heraldic trumpetAcclaimed him on his way;Their court and camp have perished;The song live on for ay.

Nobody saw or heard them,But, all around him there,Spirits of light and musicWent treading the April air.

He passed like any pedlar,Yet he had wealth untold.The galleons of the armadaCould not contain his gold.

The kings rode on to darkness.In Englands conquering hour,Unseen arrived her splendour;Unknown, her conquering power.

Amy Lowell

A Coloured Print by Shokei

It winds along the face of a cliffThis path which I long to explore,And over it dashes a waterfall,And the air is full of the roarAnd the thunderous voice of water which sweepIn silver torrent over some steep.

It clears the path with a mighty boundAnd tumbles below and away,And trees and the bushes which grow in the rocksAre wet with its jewelled spray;The air is misty and heavy with sound,And small, wet wildflowers star the ground.

Oh! The dampness is very good to smell,And the path is soft to tread,And beyond the fall it winds up and on,While little streamlets threadTheir own meandering way down the hillEach singing its own little song, until

I forget that is only a pictured path,And I hear the water and wind,And look through the mist, and strain my eyesTo see what there is behind;For it must lead to a happy land,This little path by a waterfall spanned.

Amy Lowell

A Japanese Wood-Carving

High up above the open, welcoming doorIt hangs, a piece of wood with colours dim.Once, long ago, it was a waving treeAnd knew the sun and shadow through the leavesOf forest trees, in a thick eastern wood.The winter snows had bent its branches down,The spring had swelled its buds with coming flowers,Summer had run like fire through its veins,While autumn pelted it with chestnut burrs,And strewed the leafy ground with acorn cups.Dark midnight stroms had roared and crashed amongIts branches, breaking here and there a limb;But every now and then broad sunlit daysLovingly lingered, caught among the leaves.Yes, it had known all this, and yet to usIt does not speak of mossy forest ways,Of whispering pine trees or the shimmering birch;But of quick winds, and the salt, stinging sea!And artist once, with patient, careful knife,Had fashioned it like to the untamed sea.Here waves uprear themselves, their tops blown backBy the gay, sunny wind, which whips the blueAnd breaks it into gleams and sparks of light.Among the flashing waves are two white birdsWhich swoop, and soar, and scream for very joyAt the wild sport. Now diving quickly in,Questing some glistening fish. Now flying up,Their dripping feathers shining in the sun,While the wet drops like little glints of light,Fall pattering backward to the parent sea.Gliding along the green and foam-flecked hollows,Or skimming some white crest about to break,The spirits of the sky deigning to stoopAnd play with ocean in a summer mood.Hanging above the high, wide open door,It brings to us in quiet, firelit room,The freedom of the earth’s vast solitudes,Where heaping, sunny waves tumble and roll,And seabirds sream in wanton happiness.

Amy Lowell

Apology

Be not angry with me that I bearYour colours everywhere,All through each crowed street,And meetThe wonder-light in every eye,As I go by.

Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,Blinded by rainbow haze,The stuff of happiness,No less,Which wraps me in its glad-hued foldsOf peacock golds.

Around me is the sound of steepled bells,And rich perfurmed smells Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,And shourdMe from close contact with the world.I dwell impearled.

You blazon me with jeweled insignia.A flaming nebulaRims in my life. And yetYou setThe worn upon me, unconfessedTo go unguessed.

Anna Akhmatova

Celebrate

Celebrate our anniversary – can’t you seeTonight the snowy night of our first winterComes back again in every road and tree –That winter night of diamantine splendour.

Steam is pouring out of yellow stables,The Moika rivers sinking under snow,The moonlights misted as it is in fables,And where we are heading – I don’t know.

There are iceberg on the Marsovo Pole.The Lebyazh’ya’ crazed with crystal art …..Whose soul can compare with my soul,If joy and fear are in my heart? –

And if your voice, a marvellous bird’s,Quivers at my shoulder, in the night,And the snow shines with a silver light,Warmed by a sudden ray, by your words?

Anna Akhmatova

Memory of Sun

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.Grass grows yellower.Faintly if at all the early snowflakesHover, hover.

Water becoming ice is slowing inThe narrow channels.Nothing at all will happen here again,Will ever happen.

Against the sky the willow spreads a fanThe silk’s torn off.May be it’s better I did not becomeYour wife.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.What is it? – dark?Perhaps! Winter will have occupied usIn the night.

Anna Akhmatova

White Night

I haven’t locked the door,Nor lit the candles,You don’t know, don’t care,That tired I haven’t the strengthTo decide to go to bed.Seeing the fields fade inThe sunset murk of pine-needles,And to know all is lost,

That life is a cursed hell:I’ve got drunkOn your voice in the doorway.I was sure you’d come back.

Bertolt Brecht

Radio Poem

You little box, held to me escapingSo that your valves should not breakCarried from house to house to ship from sail to train,So that my enemies might go on talking to me,Near my bed, to my painThe last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,Of their victories and of my cares,Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

Bertolt Brecht

Questions From a Worker Who Reads

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?In the books you will find the names of kings.Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?And Babylon, many times demolishedWho raised it up so many times? In what housesOf gold-glittering Lima did builders live?Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finishedDid the masons go? Great RomeIs full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whomDid the caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in songOnly palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled AtlantisThe night the ocean engulfed itThe drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.Was he alone?Caesar beat the Gauls.Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armadaWent down. Was he the only one to weep?Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War. Who Else won it?

Every page a victory.Who cooked the feast for the victors?Every ten years a great man?Who paid the bill?

So many reports.So many questions.

Bertolt Brecht

I’m not Saying Anything Against, Alexander

Timur, I hear, took the trouble to conquer the earth.I don’t understand him.With a bit of hard liquor you forget the earth.

I’m not saying anything against, Alexander,Only I have seen people who were remarkable,Highly deserving of your admirationFor the fact that they were alive at all.

Great men generate too much sweat.In all of this I see a proof thatThey couldn’t stand being on their ownAnd smoking and drinking and the like.And they must be too mean-spirited to getContentment from sitting by a woman.

Carl Sandburg

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tellMe what is happiness.And I went to famous executives who boss the work of Thousands of men.They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as thoughI was trying to fool with themAnd then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out alongThe Desplaines river And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees withTheir women and children and a keg of beer and anAccordion.

Carl Sandburg

Horses and Men in Rain

Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter’s day, gray wind pattering frozenRaindrops on the window,And let us talk about milk wagon drivers on grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches –and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.Let us write of olden, golden days and hunter of theHoly Grail and men called “knights” riding horses in the train, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping The hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers and write poems of Launcelot,The hero, andRoland, the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the train.

Carl Sandburg

Languages

There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance.It is a river, this language,Once in a thousand yearsBreaking a new courseChanging its way to the ocean.It is mountain effluviaMoving to valleysAnd from nation to nationCrossing borders and mixing.Languages die like rivers.Words wrapped round your tongue todayAnd broken to shape of thoughtBetween your teeth and lips speakingNow and todayShall be faded hieroglyphicsTen thousand year from now.Sing –and singing—rememberYour song dies and changesAnd is not here tomorrowAny more than the windBlowing ten thousand years ago.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A Little While

A little while a little loveThe hour yet bears for thee and meWho have not drawn the veil to seeIf still our heaven be lit above.Thou merely, at the day’s last sigh,Has felt thy soul prolong the tone;And I have heard the night-wind cryAng deemed its speech mine own.

A little while a little loveThe scattering autumn hoards for usWhose bower is not yet ruinousNor quite unleaved our songless grove.Only across the shaken boughsWe hear the flood-tides seek the sea,And deep in both our hearts they rouseOne wail for thee and me.

A little while a little loveMay yet be ours who have not saidThe word it makes our eyes afraidTo know that each is thinking of.Not yet the end: be our lips dumbIn smiles a little season yet:I’ll tell thee, when the end is come,How we may forget.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Autumn Song

Knowest thou not at the fall of the leafHow the heart feels a languid griefLaid on it for a covering,And how sleep seems a goodly thingIn Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brainFalters because it is in vain,In Autumn at the fall of leafKnowest thou not? And how the chiefOf joys seems—not to suffer pain?

Knowest thou not at the fall of the leafHow the soul feels like a dried sheafBound up at length for harvesting,And how death seems a comely thingIn Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, --The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms‘neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edgeWhere the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.‘Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-flyHangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: --So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.Oh! Clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,This close-companioned inarticulate hourWhen twofold silence was the song of love.

Delmore Schwartz

Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses

Nothing is given which is not taken.

Little or nothing is taken which is not freely desired,Freely, truly and fully.

“you would not seek me if you had not found me” : this isTrue of all that is supremely desired and admired …

“An enigma is an animal, “said the hurried, harriedSchoolboy:

And a horse divided against it self cannot stand;

And a moron is a man who believes in having too manyWives: what warm is there in that?

O the endless fecundity of poetry is equaledBy its endless inexhaustible freshness, as in the discoveryOf America and of poetry.

Hence it is clear that the truth is not strait and narrow but infinite:All roads lead to Rome and to poetryAnd to poem, sweet poemAnd form, away towards are the same typography.

Hence the poet must be, in a way, stupid and naïve and aLittle child;

Unless ye be as a little child ye cannot enter the kingdomOf poetry.

Hence the poet must be able to become a tiger like Blake;A carousel like Rilke.

Hence he must be all things to be free, for all impersonationsA doormat and a monumentTo all situations possible or actualThe cuckold, the cuckoo, the conqueror, and the coxcomb.

It is to him in the zoo that the zoo cries out and the hyena:“Hello, take off your hat, king of the beasts, and be seated, Mr. Bones.”

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous.He must die a little death each morning.He must swallow his toad and study his vomitAs Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

The poet must be or become both Keats and Renoir andKeats as Renoir.Mozart as Figaro and Edgar Allan Poe as Ophelia, stonedOut of her mindDrowning in the river called forever river and ever …

Keats as Mimi, Camile, and an aging gourmet.He must also refuse the favors of the unattainable lady(as Baudelaire refused Madame Sabatier when the fairBlonde summoned him,

For Jeanne Duval was enough and more than enough,Although she cuckolded himWith errand boys, servants, waiters; reality was Jeanne Duval.Had he permitted Madame Sabatier to teach the poet a greater whitenessHis devotion and conception of the divinity of BeautyWould have suffered and absolute diminution.)

The poet must be both Casanova and St. Anthony,Phaedre,Genghis khan, Genghis Cohen, Gordon Martini,Dandy Ghandi, and St. Francis,

Proffesor Tenure, and Dizzy the dean and Disraeli of Death.

He would have worn the horns of existence upon his head,He would have perceived them regarding the looking-glass,He would have needed them the way a moose needs a hatrack;Above his heavy head and in his loaded eyes, black and scorched,He would have seen the meaning of the hat-rack, above the glassLooking in the dark foyer.

For the poet must become nothing but poetry,He must be nothing but a poem when he is writingUntil he is absent-minded as the dead areForgetful as the nymphs of Lethe and a lobotomy …(“the fat weed that rots on Lethe wharf”)

Delmore Schwartz

Archaic Bust Of Apollo(after Rilke)

We cannot know the indescribable faceWhere the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,His torso has a candelabra’s glow,His gaze, contained as in a mirror’s grace,

Shines within it. Otherwise his breastWouldn’t be dazzling. Nor would you recognizeThe smile that moves along his curving thighs,There where love’s strength is caught within its nest.

This stone would not be broken, but intactBeneath the shoulders’ flowing cataract,Nor would it glisten like a stallion’s hide,

Brimming with radiance from every sideAs a star sparkles. Now it is dawn once more.All place scrutinize you. You must be reborn.

Delmore Schwartz

Phoenix Lyrics

IIf nature is life, nature is death:It is winter as it is spring:Confusion is variety, varietyAnd confusion in everthingMake experience the true conclusionOf all desire and opulence,All satisfaction and poverty.

IIWhen a hundred years had passed nature seemed to manA clockAnother century sank away and nature seemed a jungleIn a rockAnd now that nature has become a ticking and hiddenBomb how we must mockNewton, Democritus, the DeityThe heart’s ingenuity and the mind’s infiniteUncontrollableInsatiable curiosity.

IIIPurple black cloud at sunset: it is late AugustAnd the light begins to look cold, and as we look,Listen a look, we hear the first drums of autumn.

Emily Dickinson

After a Hundred Years

After a hundred yearsNo body knows the place, --Agony, that enacted there,Motionless as peace.

Wind of summer fieldsRecollect the way, --Instinct picking up the keyDropped by memory.

Emily Dickinson

An English Breeze

Up with the sun, the breeze arose,Across the talking corn she goes,And smooth she rustles far and wideThrough all the voiceful countryside.

Through all the land her tale she tells;She spins, she compelsThe kites, the clouds, the windmill sailsAnd the all the trees in all the dales.

God calls us, and the day preparesWith nimble, gay and gracious airs:And from Penzance to MaidenheadThe roads last night He watered.

God calls us from inglorious ease,Forth and to travel with the breezeWhile, switft and singing, smooth and strongShe gallops by the fields along.

Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop the Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,Their lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of grazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,The cornice but a mound.

Since then’t is centuries; but eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses’ headsWere toward eternity.

Edgar Allan Poe

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw; I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow; I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone;And all I loved, I loved alone.Then- in my childhood, in the dawnOf a most stormy life- was drawnFrom every depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that round me rolledIn its autumn tint of gold,From the lightning in the skyAs it passed me flying by,From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Heaven was blue)Of a demon in my view.

Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,In a kingdom by the sea,That a maiden there lived whom you may knowBy the name of ANNABEL LEE;And this maiden she lived with no other thoughtThan to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,In this kingdom by the sea;But we loved with a love that was more than love-I and my Annabel Lee;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,In this kingdom by the sea,A wind blew out of a cloud, chillingMy beautiful Annabel Lee;So that her highborn kinsman cameAnd bore her away from me,To shut her up in a sepulchreIn this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,Went envying her and me-Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,In this kingdom by the sea)That the wind came out of the cloud by night,Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the loveOf those who were older than we-Of many far wiser than we-And neither the angels in heaven above,Nor the demons down under the sea,Can ever dissever my soul from the soulOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee;And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyesOf the beautiful Annabel Lee;And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the sideOf my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,In the sepulchre there by the sea,In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Langston Hughes

As I Grew Older

It was a long time ago.I have almost forgotten my dream.But it was there then,In front of me,Bright like a sun--My dream.And then the wall rose,Rose slowly,Slowly,Between me and my dream.Rose until it touched the sky--The wall.Shadow.I am black.I lie down in the shadow.No longer the light of my dream before me,Above me.Only the thick wall.Only the shadow.My hands!My dark hands!Break through the wall!Find my dream!Help me to shatter this darkness,To smash this night,To break this shadowInto a thousand lights of sun,Into a thousand whirling dreamsOf sun!

Pablo Neruda

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.I buried him in the gardennext to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,his bad manners and his cold nose,and I, the materialist, who never believedin any promised heaven in the skyfor any human being,I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdomwhere my dog waits for my arrivalwaving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,of having lost a companionwho was never servile.His friendship for me, like that of a porcupinewithholding its authority,was the friendship of a star, aloof,with no more intimacy than was called for,with no exaggerations:he never climbed all over my clothesfilling me full of his hair or his mange,he never rubbed up against my kneelike other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he'd keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tailas we walked together on the shores of the seain the lonely winter of Isla Negrawhere the wintering birds filled the skyand my hairy dog was jumping aboutfull of the voltage of the sea's movement:my wandering dog, sniffing awaywith his golden tail held high,face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,and that's all there is to it.

Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer

Pablo Neruda

Enigmas

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?I reply, the ocean knows this.You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describinghow the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architectureof the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched outin the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxesis endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petalhard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of lightand untied its knot, letting its musical threads fallfrom a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on aheadof human eyes, dead in those darknesses,of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudeson the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigatingthe endless star,and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Translated by Robert Bly

Pablo Neruda

A Song of Despair

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain mein the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief my desire was to you!How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

Thomas Dylan

All, All and All The Dry Worlds Lever

IAll, all and all the dry worlds lever,Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,All from the oil, the pound of lava.City of spring, the governed flower,Turns in the earth that turns the ashenTowns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.All, all and all, the corpse’s lover,Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

IIFear not the waking world, my mortal,Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

IIIAll, all and all the dry worlds couple,Ghost with her ghost, contagious manWith the womb oh his shapeless people.All that shapes from the caul and suckle,Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people’s fusion,O light in zenith, the couple bud,And the flame in the flesh’s vision.Out of the sea, the drive of soil,Socket and grave, the brassy blood,Flower, flower, all, all and all.

Thomas Dylan

Deaths and Entrances

On almost the incendiary eveOf several near deaths,When one at the great least of your best lovedAnd always known must leaveLions and fires of his flying breath,Of your immortal friendsWho’d raise the organs of the counted dustTo shoot and sing your praise,One who called deepest down shall hold his peaceThat cannot sink or ceaseEndlessy to his woundIn many married London’s estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eveWhen at your lips and keys,Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,One who is most unknown,Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,Will dive up to his tears.He’ll bathe his raining blood in the male seaWho strode for your own deadAnd wind his globe out of your water threadAnd load the throats of shellsWith every cry since lightFlashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eveOf deaths and entrances,When near and strange wounded on London’s wavesHave sought your single grave,Our enemy, of many, who knows wellYour heart is luminousIn the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,Will pull the thunderboltsTo shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keysAnd sear just riders back,Until that one loved leastLoom the last Samson of your zodiac.

Thomas DylanElegy

Too proud to die; broken and blind he diedThe darkest way, and did not turn away,A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, oh, forever mayHe lie lighty, at least, on the last, crossedHill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lostOr still all the numberless days of his death, thoughAbove all he longed for his mother’s breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind groundThe darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,In the muted house, one minute beforeNoon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I sawThrough his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.(an old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and heWill never never go out of my mind.All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he diedHating his God, but what he was plain;An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.Even as a baby he had never cried;Nor die he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light gilde.Here among the luight of the lording skyAnd old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son’s eyeOn whom a world of ills came down like sow.He cried as he died, fearing at the last spheres’

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:Too proud to cry, too fail to check the tears,And caught between two nights, blindness and death

O deepest wound of all that he should dieOn that darkest day. Oh, he could hideThat tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)Robert Frost

A Boundless Moment

He halted in the wind, and -- what was thatFar in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?He stood there bringing March against his thought,And yet too ready to believe the most.

"Oh, that's the Paradise-in-bloom," I said;And truly it was fair enough for flowershad we but in us to assume in marchSuch white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,Myself as one his own pretense deceives;And then I said the truth (and we moved on).A young beech clinging to its last year's leaves.

Robert Frost

A Brook In The City

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to squareWith the new city street it has to wearA number in. But what about the brookThat held the house as in an elbow-crook?I ask as one who knew the brook, its strengthAnd impulse, having dipped a finger lengthAnd made it leap my knuckle, having tossedA flower to try its currents where they crossed.The meadow grass could be cemented downFrom growing under pavements of a town;The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.Is water wood to serve a brook the same?How else dispose of an immortal forceNo longer needed? Staunch it at its sourceWith cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrownDeep in a sewer dungeon under stoneIn fetid darkness still to live and run --And all for nothing it had ever doneExcept forget to go in fear perhaps.No one would know except for ancient mapsThat such a brook ran water. But I wonderIf from its being kept forever under,The thoughts may not have risen that so keepThis new-built city from both work and sleep.

Robert Frost

A Minor Bird

I have wished a bird would fly away,And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the doorWhen it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrongIn wanting to silence any song.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Burnt Norton

ITime present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose garden. My words echoThus, in your mind.

But to what purposeDisturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leavesI do not know.

Other echoesInhabit the garden. Shall we follow?Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,Round the corner. Through the first gate,Into our first world, shall we followThe deception of the thrush? Into our first world.There they were, dignified, invisible,Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,And the bird called, in response toThe unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the rosesHad the look of flowers that are looked at.They were there as our guests, accepted and accepting.So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,Along the empty alley, into the box circle,To look down into the drained pool.Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,The surface glittered out of heart of light,And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.Go, go, go, said the bird: human kindCannot bear very much reality.Time past and time futureWhat might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.

IIGarlic and sapphires in the mudClot the bedded axle-tree.The trilling wire in the bloodSings below inveterate scarsAnd reconciles forgotten wars.The dance along the arteryThe circulation of the lymphAre figured in the drift of starsAscend to summer in the treeWe move above the moving treeIn light upon the figured leafAnd hear below the sodden floorBelow, the boarhound and the boarPursue their pattern as beforeBut reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,The release from action and suffering, release from the innerAnd the outer compulsion, yet surroundedBy a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,Ehrebung without motion, concentrationWithout elimination, both a new worldAnd the old made explicit, understoodIn the completion of its partial ecstasy,The resolution of its partial horror.Yet the enchainment of past and futureWoven in the weakness of the changing body,Protects mankind from heaven and damnationWhich flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time futureAllow but a little consciousness.To be conscious is not to be in timeBut only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,The moment in the draughty church at smokefallBe remembered; involved with past and future.Only through time time is conquered.

IIIHere is a place of disaffectionTime before and time afterIn a dim light: neither daylightInvesting form with lucid stillnessTurning shadow into transient beautyWith a slow rotation suggesting permanenceNor darkness to purify the soulEmptying the sensual with deprivationCleansing affection from the temporal.Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentrationMen and bits of paper, whirled by the cold windThat blows before and after time,Wind in and out of unwholesome lungsTime before and time after.Eructation of unhealthy soulsInto the faded air, the torpidDriven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not hereNot here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend onlyInto the world of perpetual solitude,World not world, but that which is not world,Internal darkness, deprivationAnd destitution of all property,Desiccation of the world of sense,Evacuation of the world of fancy,In operancy of the world of spirit;This is the one way, and the otherIs the same, not in movementBut abstention from movement; while the world movesIn appetency, on its metalled waysOf time past and time future.

IVTime and the bell have buried the day,The black cloud carries the sun away.Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematisStray down, bend to us; tendril and sprayClutch and cling?ChillFingers of yew be curledDown on us? After the kingfisher's wingHas answered light to light, and is silent, the light is stillAt the still point of the turning world.

VWords move, music movesOnly in time; but that which is only livingCan only die. Words, after speech, reachInto the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,Can words or music reachThe stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,Not that only, but the co-existence,Or say that the end precedes the beginning,And the end and the beginning were always thereBefore the beginning and after the end.And all is always now. Words strain,Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,Will not stay still. Shrieking voicesScolding, mocking, or merely chattering,Always assail them. The Word in the desertIs most attacked by voices of temptation,The crying shadow in the funeral dance,The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,As in the figure of the ten stairs.Desire itself is movementNot in itself undesirable;Love is itself unmoving,Only the cause and end of movement,Timeless, and undesiringExcept in the aspect of timeCaught in the form of limitationBetween un-being and being.Sudden in a shaft of sunlightEven while the dust movesThere rises the hidden laughterOf children in the foliageQuick now, here, now, always -Ridiculous the waste sad timeStretching before and after.

William Blake

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,Night and morning with my tears;And I sunned it with smiles,And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,Till it bore an apple bright.And my foe beheld it shine.And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stoleWhen the night had veiled the pole;In the morning glad I seeMy foe outstretched beneath the tree.

William Blake

A Little Boy Lost

v'Nought loves another as itself,Nor venerates another so,Nor is it possible to thoughtA greater than itself to know.

'And, father, how can I love you Or any of my brothers more?I love you like the little birdThat picks up crumbs around the door.'

The Priest sat by and heard the child;In trembling zeal he seized his hair,He led him by his little coat,And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,'Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:'One who sets reason up for judgeOf our most holy mystery.'

The weeping child could not be heard,The weeping parents wept in vain:They stripped him to his little shirt,And bound him in an iron chain,

And burned him in a holy placeWhere many had been burned before;The weeping parents wept in vain.Are such thing done on Albion's shore?